Software Updates

Rockstor 3.9.1 is now available. Six contributors have come together to close 30+ issues, including Major feature updates and bug fixes to make this update happen. Disk encryption with LUKS is the biggest feature we’ve added and something the community has been wanting for a while. We’ve also added support for scheduling power management and jumbo frames just to name a few. This update also comes with a 4.10 kernel from elrepo and a btrfs-progs update from the BTRFS community. It is my pleasure to make this announcement.

For new installs, We created a brand new 3.9.1 ISO. Please purchase a subscription for Stable updates subscription after install and enjoy these benefits. Stable update subscribers can update from the UI as usual.

We’ve just wrapped up a fun release cycle, and it’s my pleasure to announce Rockstor 3.9.0. Our community has been really active and we’ve prioritized nicely to improve on a few different areas. 6 contributors have come together for this release and besides working on new features and bug fixes, we made significant improvements to code quality. @phillxnet has made a big enhancement to the disk management subsystem. I’ve made large code quality improvement to backend Python stack. @MFlyer collaborated with me on that and took upon himself to do the same for all of Javascript stack. He made several ninja style contributions and helped fix many bugs. I’d say this is a nice release with some new stuff and a bunch of useful maintenance updates. Thanks to everyone that made this happen!

For new installs, We created a brand new 3.9.0 ISO. Please purchase a subscription for Stable updates subscription after install and enjoy these benefits. Stable update subscribers can update from the UI as usual.

I am happy to announce Rockstor 3.8.16. It has been an exciting release cycle in which 6 contributors have come together to close 35 issues in the last 5 weeks. The theme of this release is Maintenance! It’s worth noting that there are many overall stability and reliability improvements in this release, from Django upgrade to the tiniest of UI fixes and everything in between. A large set of issues reported in our forum and github were resolved. We’ve really suited Rockstor up for a year-end holiday party and are deeply grateful for the engagement and contributions of our great community!

For new installs, We created a brand new 3.8.16 ISO which is a rebase of a newer CentOS release. Please purchase a subscription for Stable updates subscription after install and enjoy these benefits. Stable update subscribers can update from the UI as usual. Please refer to the e-mail we sent out to all subscribers with some additional information that may be necessary.

I am thrilled to announce the release of Rockstor 3.8.15. It’s been a long release cycle and It’s our 30th release, woohoo! We have entered a new phase of Rockstor community growth with steady patches from dedicated contributors. A total of 43 issues were closed making this a substantial update. Several enhancements were made to the UI, prominently to the dashboard. I’d like to also highlight the big(design and implementation) refactoring of our backend disk management. Last but not least, numerous improvements and bugfixes were committed throughout the stack. Please see the list below for detailed log of all patches that went in.

It’s ironic that we took longer to close this release cycle despite more contributors and a lot more eyeballs overall, but that is primarily due to inefficiencies in my gate-keeping. We learned how to make things more efficient in the next cycle and plan to close it quicker.

The 3.8.15 ISO is downloadable from here for new users. After installation, please purchase Stable update subscription and take advantage of many benefits that come with it. Existing subscribers on the other hand, can update easily from the Web-UI.

I am happy to announce that Rockstor 3.8-14 is now released. We’ve added big new features including an interface to power down HDDs to reduce noise and conserve electricity, and a way to browse and download logs almost too easily with a few clicks on the UI. As usual, there are may enhancements and bug fixes. 34 issues were closed altogether by the hard and smart work of 8 different contributors!

The 3.8-14 ISO is downloadable from here for new users. After installation, please purchase Stable update subscription and take advantage of many benefits that come with it. Existing subscribers on the other hand, can update easily from the Web-UI.

We welcomed new contributors in this 3.8-14 release cycle, most we’ve had so far working together on one release. As the project’s maintainer this makes me very happy. Our community is strengthening with every release, thanks to everyone including code contributors, forum members, incident support purchasers, stable-updates subscribers, patrons donating and purchasing t-shirts, usb drives and stickers from our shop. Much appreciated!

To better organize support matters and provide a reliable platform for our paying users, we’ve launched a new support portal, using osticket. We hope to provide more value to customers purchasing incident bundles. Home users that subscribe to Stable updates are also eligible for limited paid support with the option to purchase more support as needed. Details will be added to documentation in the coming days.

Rockstor3.8-13 is now available! We closed 23 issues of different magnitudes in this cycle. The two big ones include adding support for Network Teaming and Bonding, and advanced S.M.A.R.T management support. These features were requested and voted for, by many users which makes us especially happy to finally roll out.

There were several fixes and enhancements as well, following the established trend of our updates. All this is possible, thanks to a strong and growing community. We welcomed two new contributors in this cycle, @MFlyer and @ScarabMonkey. A total of five contributors collaborated to bring you this release. Also, as always, thanks to subscribers for supporting our effort. We are delighted to bring you this update.

The 3.8-13 ISO is downloadable from here for new users. After installation, please purchase Stable update subscription and take advantage of many benefits that come with it. Existing subscribers on the other hand, can update easily from the Web-UI.

3.8-13 release cycle was fun, and made substantial with high participation, both by regular and new community members. We are evolving and reinforcing our iterative development habit with every release, which means a lot of short term improvements and sustained long term work along with new features. We were able to react to bugs faster in this cycle thanks to active users who are quick to report and in some cases, document the fix or even open a pull request. I regret not getting to a couple of pull requests still pending review, which I am looking forward to next!

Rockstor3.8-12 is now available! This is our fourth release update in the Stable channel and we are encouraged by the support of subscribers as we continue to improve Rockstor. Thanks for keeping the project alive.

We’ve created a new 3.8-12 ISO downloadable from here for new users. After installation, please purchase Stable update subscription and take advantage of many benefits that come with it. Existing subscribers on the other hand, can update easily from the Web-UI.

3.8-12 release cycle was very different compared to the ones before. Usually, we work on a couple of bigger items, like a brand new feature or two and a bunch of smaller enhancements and bug fixes. But this time, there has been much more community activity with users reporting bugs and requesting minor improvements to existing features. So we focused entirely on closing as many user reported issues as possible and closed 26 issues in total. In a continuing trend, that is a few more issues than the previous one.

I am really pleased to see every feature of Rockstor being used by more and more users. We are eager to keep up with the community and make swift improvements. Over all, we’ve improved many features including AD integration, S.M.A.R.T, Rock-Ons among others. Happy to finally close the Tenaya milestone!

I am happy to announce the release of Rockstor3.8-11. This is our third release in the Stable updates channel and I’d like to thank subscribers for their support. As usual, subscribers can just update to this release from the Web-UI.

For new users, we’ve created a brand new 3.8-11 ISO downloadable from here. After installation, please purchase Stable update subscription and take advantage of many benefits that come with it.

This release cycle was pretty exciting with increased community activity. Many users offered feedback, test results, bug reports and shared useful information with everyone else in the community. The usual code contributors submitted many pull requests to add new functionality, improve existing functionality and fix bugs. We also welcomed a new contributor in this cycle, which is always special!

All together, we closed 24 issues, 11 more compared to last cycle. There are two significant changes I’d like to highlight. We made several improvements to the Rock-Ons system, including making it easy for users and add their own custom Rock-Ons and 3rd party contributors to submit theirs for wider community. We added new Rock-Ons including Discourse and Jenkins. We also made the system significantly more robust and simpler. Expect more changes in the next cycle, but a lot of heavy lifting was done in this one.

Second significant change is to the inner workings of the Web-UI. We’ve revamped templating and overhauled existing templates using Handlebars. As a result, the UI is leaner, faster and code is a lot more readable and simpler. Most of the credit goes to @priyaganti for this massive patch set.

There are many other improvements and bugfixes to S.M.A.R.T, NUT and SSL cert management to name a few. Many thanks to @phillxnet for nicely crafted pull requests and to community members for testing and engaging in issue reporting.

In addition to above issues, we’ve also updated the default kernel to 4.3.3 along with btrfs-progs. Thank you for reading till the end! Here’s a discount code for first 25 Stable subscriptions: ROCKSTOR3811

Rockstor 3.8-10 release is now available. This is our second release in the Stable updates channel. Many thanks to users who purchased Stable update subscriptions. Your support is not only greatly appreciated, but crucial to us. If you are subscribed to Stable updates, you can easily update the system from the Web-UI.

New users can download 3.8-10 from here. Keep Rockstor live and thriving by purchasing the Stable subscription!

We closed 13 issues in this release, compared to 20 in 3.8-9. And this release took a bit longer. If you are wondering why, it’s because of the big feature improvement in this release: Asynchronous Replication. This feature efficiently replicates Shares on one Rockstor appliance to another by using BTRFS send/receive functionality. While this feature was added a while ago, it was a bit over engineered, buggy and had to be improved. I started refactoring the existing pub-sub design and ended up completely redesigning it. The result is a much simpler and more robust implementation. I plan to write more about it here and the community wiki soon.

Besides Replication, the community really came together to help fix a bunch of bugs, make several enhancements and also improve test coverage. I want to thank our regular contributors @phillxnet, @Mchakravartula, @priyaganti for their important pull requests, testing and insights. Plus, special thanks to @grogi, our new and 11th contributor! Last but not least, the community involvement has been superb with testing, bug reports and knowledge sharing. It’s very encouraging to have such a smart and diverse feedback system as we continue to improve Rockstor.

Here’s the list of issues resolved in this update with links to more information.

Rockstor 3.8-9 update is now available. This is our first update released under the stable update channel. Some of you may be aware that we split updates into Stable and Testing channels. I wrote about this briefly in the last post and there’s more information about them in our documentation as well.

Current users running prior versions can update to 3.8-9 after activating the Stable channel subscription. New users can just install from the 3.8-9 ISO. Since the launch of update subscriptions a few weeks ago, we are seeing steady purchases. I am happy to see organic traction, but we need a lot more subscriptions to keep up the effort. So, if you like Rockstor and haven’t bought the Stable subscription yet, please do!

We closed 20 issues in this release and I want to thank all the contributors. We have a dev log in our forum detailing the ongoing work and some of you may already be aware of the coming changes. Detailed list follows, but the highlights include fixes to Active Directory integration, S.M.A.R.T monitoring, better Systemd integration and improved test coverage.

I want to thank @phillxnet for contributing many minor enhancements, @Mchakravartula for improving test coverage and fixing up code along the way, @maxhq for being our new and 10th contributor(hooray!) and @roweryan for testing, reporting issues and ensuring that we aren’t slacking 🙂 Last but not least, many thanks to @vinima for contributions to documentation and video tutorials.